How to Grow Your Online Sales Department
By now, and if you’ve read my last two posts – Don’t Break The Process and Can’t an Online Sales Counselor Just Take the Lead Through Sale? NO! – then you may be starting to consider growing your online sales department.
Before a little thing called COVID, most walk in traffic really was digital traffic. Did I just blow your mind? Everyone in sales now is saying they’ve always had walk-in traffic. True. But it wasn’t because every person just accidentally happened upon the community and decided, “Hey! I want to buy a house today.” It’s not a puppy. (Okay even buying a puppy better come with some research.) Unless the only marketing a builder ever did was to put up signs on the side of the highway, most traffic for at least the past 20 years has utilized the internet to do some form of research.
When I started as an OSC in 2007, we said 70% of people started their research online. Now it’s evident that 100% of people do some research online before they ever go out to see a builder.
So while walk-in traffic is slow, more people are spending more time online and taking advantage of builders who are set up with OSCs to get their questions asked before they venture out. You can’t sift the leads and say – well these would have been walk-ins so they need to go to the agents and this batch over here goes to the OSC? So what do you do?
If your digital lead load has increased you grow your OSC department. You don’t just send leads to your agents.
Some may ask, well if we need to reformat our traditional agent/model department, can’t we just move agents who are not getting as many sales over to the online sales department? BE CAREFUL!
These roles really aren’t interchangeable. Some site sales agents may be successful as online sales counselors, but not all. There are different qualities and underlying driving forces that make an excellent OSC vs an excellent Agent. I can talk your ear off about it, and it’s one of the reasons I love being involved in the OSC recruiting process for builders. I know what I’m looking for, and often it’s not a sales agent.